Heres the concept in a nutshell:
– GDKP stands for “Gold-DKP”
– It was a Korean concept brought to WoW
– Items which drop in your run are auctioned off in raid chat. The highest bidder receives the item and the gold they pay is added to “The Pot”
– Profession Patterns, BOE’s, Crusader Orbs etc are all auctioned off in this manner as well. Everything that drops.
– The pot keeps growing in value until the end of the run
– The pot is split evenly at the end of the run to all 25 players in the raid present when the final boss dies.
– There is no mainspec > offspec priority, its gold which determines who gets items.

This isn’t something I’ve seen on my server so I’m not sure if the idea has really taken off in Europe yet. But it probably will. If there’s one thing that might make running an old raid instance more palatable, it is getting a nice cash pot at the end of the run.

I do see advantages to the system. Players are encouraged to stay right to the end. Well geared main characters are encouraged to come even if they don’t want any drops. Well heeled alts can get geared up quickly and without much grind. In fact, you could do a couple of runs on a main to earn cash so that you could take your alt on a third run and gear it up there (if you really hate earning gold by any other means than raiding).

Then there are the disadvantages – it encourages gold selling. If you could spend some real cash for in game gold and translate it so easily into items via a GDKP run, why do anything else? How many useless but rich alts can you take along without the whole run becoming a tedious drag?

But the general idea seems so sound that I wonder if hidden somewhere in the GDKP is the future of real money transactions in games. After all, all Blizzard (or any company) needs to do to complete the circle is to sell gold themselves ….